Xbox Hits an All-Time Low as Memory Costs Climb

U.S. Xbox hardware unit sales are down 33% year to date through August 2026, an all-time low, according to Circana’s U.S. Retail Tracking Service. PlayStation units are 25% lower over the same stretch, the weakest Circana has recorded for the brand since 2013.

Mat Piscatella, Circana’s senior director and video game industry advisor, posted the figures on October 9. The average buyer paid $529 for a new Xbox and $597 for a PlayStation, both all-time U.S. highs, as AI data centers pull memory away from living-room hardware.

Xbox Hardware Hits an All-Time U.S. Low

Xbox’s year-to-date unit collapse is not a typical late-cycle dip. Piscatella said U.S. Xbox hardware unit sales are at an all-time low, a deeper hole than PlayStation’s 2013 trough, which came as buyers waited for the PS4.

August, the four weeks that closed the Circana window, was ugly on its own. Xbox hardware unit sales fell 31% from August 2025, the lowest August for the brand since 2020. Xbox Series dollar sales fell 13% in the same month.

Microsoft already raised U.S. Xbox prices by $20 to $70 last October, then moved again. The August 1, 2026 reset added $100 to 512GB models and $150 to 1TB models and killed the 2TB Series X. The 1TB disc Series X now lists at $799.99, $300 above its launch price.

THE AUGUST HARDWARE TALLY

• Total units: U.S. video game hardware sales fell 15% year over year to 559,000, the lowest August since 2013, when Circana counted 423,000.
• Hardware dollars: Spending fell 3% to $302 million, leaving year-to-date hardware spend at $2.5 billion, 11% behind 2025.
• Average paid: Buyers paid $541 for a new piece of hardware, an August record, up from the $476 record set a year earlier.
• Platform split: PlayStation units fell 11%, Xbox 31%, and Nintendo 15%, while PlayStation 5 dollar sales still grew 17%.

Total projected U.S. spending across content, hardware, and accessories dipped 9% in August to $4.3 billion. Content spending fell 10% to $3.8 billion. Accessories were the rare plus, up 3%.

Fewer PlayStation Boxes, Higher Dollar Sales

PlayStation is not matching Xbox’s all-time low, but it is back at a level last seen in the final year of the PS3. Year-to-date units are 25% lower than 2025. August units were the lowest for that month since 2013.

The dollar line moved the other way. PlayStation 5 hardware dollar sales grew 17% in August even as unit sales fell 11%, because the mix is now stuffed with $649.99 disc units, $599.99 digital units, and a $899.99 PS5 Pro. Piscatella put the average PlayStation sold through August at $597, up 20% from a year earlier, and said that average is an all-time U.S. high.

That $597 is not the price of a base PS5. It is what Circana sees across every PlayStation box that rang up, Pro included. Sony took the latest $100 step on the standard models in April 2026, after a $50 rise in August 2025. Six years after launch, the usual path of cheaper hardware and a wider audience is running in reverse.

Piscatella’s verdict was blunt. “Both prices are at all-time US highs. Price sensitivity is becoming a real problem,” he wrote, pairing the $597 PlayStation average with Xbox’s $529, which is up 26% and is itself a mix of Series S and Series X, not the $799.99 disc flagship.

The Memory Went to the Data Center

The shortage is not a mystery inside the industry, and it is not SRAM. Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron, which together hold as much as 93% of DRAM, have shifted wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory and fat server modules for AI accelerators. Each gigabyte of HBM eats roughly three times the wafer capacity of standard DDR5, so every wafer that leaves consumer DRAM removes several times as much living-room memory.

Team Xbox said the bill showed up in the factory cost of the box itself. In a June 25 post, the company wrote that storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and that it expects another doubling by the fall of 2027. Consoles, it added, are typically sold for less than they cost to make, which is why a parts spike hits this category harder than phones or PCs.

THE MEMORY SQUEEZE

• Contract prices: TrendForce’s late September outlook called for conventional DRAM to rise another 10-15% in the fourth quarter of 2026, with NAND flash up 15-20%, on top of three prior quarterly jumps.
• Wafer math: HBM’s stacked dies and extra processing steps consume about three times the wafer capacity of DDR5 per gigabyte, which is why AI memory starves consoles even when total factory output looks healthy.
• Supply years: SK hynix chief executive Kwak Noh-jung has said 2027 will be the worst supply year in the industry’s history, and Intel’s chief executive has put relief after 2028.
• Who gets the chips: Cloud buyers lock HBM on long contracts. Consumer DRAM, the chips inside a Series X or PS5, takes whatever capacity is left.

That is the joke buried in the Circana table. The same AI buildout that platform holders pitch as the future of games is the reason a six-year-old console costs more than it did on launch day.

What a New Console Costs Now

A new Xbox Series X with a disc drive lists at $799.99 in the United States. A PS5 disc unit lists at $649.99, the Pro at $899.99, and the cheapest Series S at $499.99, which is now the same sticker as a Switch 2. Those are list prices, not Circana’s average paid, which is lower because the mix still includes cheaper SKUs and older inventory.

U.S. LIST PRICES AFTER THE 2026 RESETS

Microsoft also stopped selling the 2TB Series X. In the same June note it pointed shoppers to previously played consoles at retail partners and to Xbox Certified Refurbished units at Microsoft Stores for up to $100 off list, a quiet admission that the new-box price is now a problem the company has to route around.

A $800 six-year-old tower is a harder sell than the $500 machine that opened this generation, and the used bin is already doing the work the old late-cycle price cuts used to do. That is not a forum complaint. It is the path Xbox published when it raised prices.

Nintendo Still Leads After a $50 Jump

Nintendo Switch 2 still led the U.S. hardware market in both unit and dollar sales in August and for 2026 through August, with PlayStation 5 second on both measures. That lead was earned at the old $449.99 sticker. Nintendo of America did not move the Switch 2 system in the U.S. from $449.99 to $499.99 until September 1, after Circana’s August window had closed.

The August Nintendo unit drop of 15%, and the 13% drop in Switch 2 dollar sales, therefore describe demand at the launch price, not at $499.99. Piscatella said September U.S. results will be released on October 22, which will be the first Circana month to carry the new Nintendo sticker.

Nintendo’s own notice blamed “various changes in market conditions, which are expected to extend over the medium to long term,” and left the original Switch’s price alone. Even with a $50 hit, Switch 2 remains the cheapest current-gen flagship in the table above, which is one reason it can still outsell a $799.99 Xbox and a $649.99 PS5 while those two fight over GTA 6.

GTA 6 Lands on a Thinner Hardware Market

Rockstar Games is launching November 19, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at $79.99 for the standard edition and $99.99 for the Ultimate Edition. Digital pre-orders can pre-load on November 12. The physical copy that reaches shops that same week is a download code in a box, not a disc.

Piscatella did not name the game. He did not have to. He called it the Big Video Game in November, then attached the catch that the Circana chart cannot solve.

Perhaps the release of the Big Video Game in November will help ease at least some of these declines. But this will also depend on product availability given the RAM and component crisis. And pricing, of course. The US hardware market has not been in a more precarious position since the early 80s.

Mat Piscatella, Circana senior director and video game industry advisor, on Bluesky

A smash release can still move hardware. It cannot mint extra DRAM. If factories are already short of memory, a November rush shows up as empty shelves and higher street prices, not as a rebuilt install base. Xbox’s own June post listed Grand Theft Auto VI among the reasons to buy a Series S, which is now a $499.99 machine, the same money as a Switch 2 and $100 more than that Series S cost before August 1.

Memory Profits Explain Why Prices Will Not Fall

The other side of the Circana crash is a memory boom. Micron’s fiscal fourth-quarter filing showed $54.23 billion in revenue for the quarter to September 3, almost five times the $11.32 billion of a year earlier, at an 86.8% gross margin. Those wafers can be sold to cloud customers on long contracts. A game console that ships at a loss is the last place a supplier wants to send them.

THE 2026 PRICE CALENDAR

1. October 2025: Xbox raises U.S. console prices by $20 to $70 and says it hopes another increase will not be necessary.
2. April 2026: Sony adds $100 to standard PS5 models and $150 to the PS5 Pro, taking the Pro to $899.99.
3. August 1, 2026: Xbox adds $100 to 512GB models and $150 to 1TB models, lists the disc Series X at $799.99, and sunsets the 2TB unit.
4. September 1, 2026: Nintendo of America moves Switch 2 to $499.99, a $50 rise that sits outside Circana’s August file.
5. October 9, 2026: Piscatella posts the year-to-date unit lows and record average prices, with September Circana due October 22.
6. November 19, 2026: Grand Theft Auto VI launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S at $79.99, into the tightest U.S. hardware market Circana has logged for Xbox and the tightest for PlayStation since 2013.

Microsoft has already told buyers to look at previously played and refurbished kits. Memory executives are still talking about 2027 as a worse supply year, not a better one. GTA 6 will sell copies to people who already own a box, and it will sell some boxes to people who can still pay $500 to $800. It will not put consumer RAM back on the wafer schedule that AI now owns.